without weakness. I have been told he was irascible. If so, it must have been no common offence that could have irritated him. He had not a jot of it in his appearance.

Another set of acquaintances which I made at this time used to assemble at the hospitable table of Mr. Hunter the bookseller, in St. Paul's Churchyard. They were the survivors of the literary party that were accustomed to dine with his predecessor, Mr. Johnson. They came, as of old, on the Friday. The most regular were Fuseli and Bonnycastle. Now and then, Godwin was present: oftener Mr. Kinnaird the magistrate, a great lover of Horace.

Fuseli was a small man, with energetic features, and a white head of hair. Our host's daughter, then a little girl, used to call him the white-headed lion. He combed his hair up from the forehead; and as his whiskers were large, his face was set in a kind of hairy frame, which, in addition to the fierceness of his look, really gave him an aspect of that sort. Otherwise, his features were rather sharp than round. He would have looked much like an old military officer, if his face, besides its real energy, had not affected more. There was the same defect in it as in his pictures. Conscious of not having all the strength he wished, he endeavoured to make out for it by violence and pretension. He carried this so far, as to look fiercer than usual when he sat for his

picture. His friend and engraver, Mr. Houghton, drew an admirable likeness of him in this state of dignified extravagance. He is sitting back in his chair, leaning on his hand, but looking ready to pounce withal. His notion of repose was like that of Pistol:

"Now, Pistol, lay thy head in Furies' lap."

Agreeably to this over-wrought manner, he was reckoned, I believe, not quite so bold as he might have been. He painted horrible pictures, as children tell horrible stories; and was frightened at his own lay-figures. Yet he would hardly have talked as he did about his terrors, had he been as timid as some supposed him. With the affected, impression is the main thing, let it be produced how it may. A student of the Academy told me, that Mr. Fuseli coming in one night, when a solitary candle had been put on the floor in a corner of the room, to produce some effect or other, he said it looked "like a damned soul." This was by way of being Dantesque, as Michael Angelo was. Fuseli was an ingenious caricaturist of that master, making great bodily displays of mental energy, and being ostentatious with his limbs and muscles, in proportion as he could not draw them. A leg or an arm was to be thrust down one's throat, because he knew we should dispute the truth of it. In the indulgence of this wilfulness of pur

pose, generated partly by impatience of study, partly by want of sufficient genius, and no doubt, also, by a sense of superiority to artists who could do nothing but draw correctly, he cared for no time, place, or circumstance, in his pictures. A set of prints, after his designs, for Shakspeare and Cowper, exhibit a chaos of mingled genius and absurdity, such as, perhaps, was never before seen. He endeavoured to bring Michael Angelo's apostles and prophets, with their superhuman ponderousness of intention, into the common-places of modern life. A student reading in a garden, is all over intensity of muscle; and the quiet tea-table scene in Cowper, he has turned into a preposterous conspiracy of huge men and women, all bent on showing their thews and postures, with dresses as fantastical as their minds. One gentleman, of the existence of whose trousers you are not aware till you see the terminating line at the ankle, is sitting and looking grim on a sofa, with his hat on and no waistcoat. Yet there is real genius in his designs for Milton, though disturbed, as usual, by strainings after the energetic. His most extraordinary mistake, after all, is said to have been on the subject of his colouring. It was a sort of livid green, like brass diseased. Yet they say, that when praised for one of his pictures, he would modestly observe, "It is a pretty colour." This might have been thought a jest on his part, if remarkable stories

were not told of the mistakes made by other people with regard to colour. Sight seems the least agreed upon, of all the senses.

Fuseli was lively and interesting in conversation, but not without his usual faults of violence and pretension. Nor was he always as decorous as an old man ought to be; especially one whose turn of mind is not of the lighter and more pleasurable cast. The licences he took were coarse, and had not sufficient regard to his company. Certainly they went a great deal beyond his friend Armstrong; to whose account, I believe, Fuseli's passion for swearing was laid. The poet condescended to be a great swearer, and Fuseli thought it energetic to swear like him. His friendship with Bonnycastle had something childlike and agreeable in it. They came and went away together, for years, like a couple of old schoolboys. They, also, like boys, rallied one another, and sometimes made a singular display of it,-Fuseli, at least; for it was he that was the aggressor. I remember, one day, Bonnycastle told a story of a Frenchman, whom he had received at his house at Woolwich, and who invited him, in return, to visit him in Paris, if ever he should cross the water. "The Frenchman told me,” said he, "that he had a superb local. When I went to Paris I called on him, and found he had a good prospect out of his window; but his superb local was at a hair-dresser's, up two pair of stairs."

"Vell, vell!” said Fuseli, impatiently (for, though he spoke and wrote English remarkably well, he never got rid of his Swiss pronunciation),—" Vellvay not? vay not? Vat is to hinder his local being superb for all thtat?"

"I don't see," returned Bonnycastle, “how a barber's house in an alley can be a superb local."

"You doan't! Vell-but thtat is not the barber's fault-It is yours."

"How do you make that out? I'm not an alley." "No; but you're coarsedly eegnorant."

"I may be as ignorant as you are polite; but you don't prove anything."

"Thte thtevil I doant! Did you not say he had a faine prospect out of window ?"

"Yes, he had a prospect fine enough!"

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Vell, thtat constituted his superb local. A superb local is not a barber's shop, by Goade! but a faine situation. But thtat is your coarsed eegnorance of thte language."

Another time, on Bonnycastle's saying that there were no longer any auto-da-fés, Fuseli said he did not know that. "At all events," said he, if you were to go into Spain, they would have an auto-da-fé immediately, oan thte strength of your appearance."

Bonnycastle was a good fellow. He was a tall, gaunt, long-headed man, with large features and spectacles, and a deep internal voice, with a twang